... and the lack thereof. I have remarked here that it seems to me that there are more and more scientists who, however fine their expertise in their specialty, seem to lack a capacity for clear thinking. This, I think, is made manifest here: Biological Basis For Creativity Linked To Mental Illness. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It would appear that they have established that mental illness and creativity both correlate to low levels of latent inhibition. They have not, however, established that mental illness and creativity correlate to each other. They assume that. Notice also this quote: "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities." Again, creativity is assumed to be abnormal, and normal people are assumed to lack creativity.

I share Patrick's fondness for David Solway and I agree with much that Solway says in Director's Cut. I am inclined to agree with Timothy Murphy about Ammons. But I can't agree on Ashbery. While I don't hold him in as high regard as Bryan does, I do find much of his work entertaining. Now there may be a peculiar reason for that. Ashbery was for many years an art critic. I was for a few years (long, long ago) a gallery director. Often, when I read Ashbery, I am reminded of those years: His poems read to me like a montage of snatches of conversation heard at an art opening. Read as such, let me tell you, they are spot on.

"It's a balancing act," said Carlin Romano, the longtime book critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. "And in this case, I think the Times Book Review knows exactly what it's doing, to tilt the balance in order to attract more advertising. But they're also giving a lot more authors the right to claim now that they're bestsellers. This will give them very good exposure, but philosophically, the more bestsellers you have, the less the term means."

I believe Carlin has questioned the accuracy - or something - about this quote, but I can';t seem to find what his objection was. As it stands, though, I tend to agree.

Patrick wonders, "Why do I find this poem so moving?" I find it moving also, but in my case I think it's because I spent the first eight years of my life living across from a rail yard, in the shadow of factories, amid vacant lots filled with ailanthus and blackberry brambles. Paintings of industrial scenes always stir something in my heart.

Friday, September 28, 2007

... in He asks in exasperation, Dan Green wonders "why is it so hard for even otherwise competent critics such as Romano to understand that when discussing a book ('pages') it's best to stick to what does exist there and avoid speculation about what doesn't?" (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It's a fair question. To what extent are the details of an author's life pertinent to that author's fiction? Usually not to any very great extent, even when the fiction is evidently "autobiographical." Henry Miller the person was apparently not all that much like the Val Miller of the Tropics. The real Jack Kerouac wasn't that much like Sal Paradise or Ray Smith. But Carlin's point in the case of Roth is, I think, that Roth's fictions are not really very fictitious and are in fact self-justifications - apologiae pro vitae suae. Can they therefore be judged as one might an autobiography? Well, as I said, it's a fair question.

Since there are more people than ever before, I think it's safe to assume there are more readers than ever. There certainly seem to be more books being published, in one way, shape, form or another than ever before. The literary landscape is different from what it was, not necessarily worse, and not, of course, necessarily better. The only constant is change.

"Nice thought if you can abide it. Unfortunately, it’s false to all human experience to find “growth” in tragedy. In fact, the dull truth is that pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering. "

"... his greatest legacy was that he embodied the true meaning of education - not something you pick up at school and university and are done with, but a lifelong exploration, as natural as breathing, and ending only with the breath."

(Of course, it is a stretch to imagine Nige "at loggerheads with all other teachers," don't you think?)

"The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realised."

Nitrous oxide is laughing gas. Maybe if enough of it gets into the atmosphere, we'll all start having a brighter outlook.

"Over time, Freud came to see that his patients were transferring feelings and hopes from other phases of their lives onto him." Let's assume this was true. How do you extrapolate from his relations with his patients and their attitude toward him to arrive at some general conclusion about human nature?

"Freud said we all seek [authoritative father] figures, in both political and personal life." Now I'm only one person, but that is still enough to call into question a universal proposition, and actually, I know perfectly well that I am not the only person who not only has never sought such, but has always been antipathetic to same.

Many years ago, after reviewing both the collected poems and collected essays of J.V. Cunningham, I got a thank-you note from Cunningham, who said, "Tt is nice to be praised for the things one would want to be praised for." I now really know what he meant.

I suppose the only way to approach Gill's devotional art is to remind oneself that it was made by a man who committed terrible sins. The human psyche is complex, inconsistent, contradictory, and as often as not downright appalling.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

I am actually closer to Grayling's views than to Bryan's or John's. Bryan, I know, has said that apocalyptism is simply realism. And that is so in the sense that empires always fall and disasters inevitably occur. Only I don't regard any of that as truly apocalyptic, or at least not apocalyptic in the strict sense. The only apocalypse I place any faith in is the one that will accompany the parousia.I think Grayling is right when he criticizes Gray for a too broad application of the term religion. but I think Grayling is wrong when he fails to see that it is not religion itself that causes the evils he deplores. It is is when religion is joined with political power. This usually happens because the state finds religion useful as a social adhesive. Moreover, the connection between political power and religious belief seems to have been operative in human affairs from the beginning. Jesus appears to have first formulated a doctrine of separation of the church from the state when he declared, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." Which his professed followers probably honored until they had the chance to share in Caesar's power. Lord Acton remains correct: "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

... I mentioned the other day that I had a longish poem published in the current issue of Boulevard.

I also mentioned that I contributed as well to a forum discussing literature and the Internet. It has occurred to me that visitors to this blog may be interested in this sample of what I had to say:

What is being overlooked in all this is that the Internet is not simply a repository for traditional content, but is developing new forms of content as well. This is what nobody is quite sure about — though it is fair to say that, whatever impact the Internet may have had so far on literature, it is likely a good deal less than the impact it is going to have. So far its impact has simply been its challenge to print. But already there is developing online what is called distributed narrative, which involves telling a story by means of networks. A good example would be email narratives. Michael Betcherman and David Diamond, for instance, put together something called The Daughters of Freya. This was an email mystery. If you subscribed, you received a number of emails every day, each of which would deepen the mystery and advance the progress toward a solution. (Figure out a way to integrate hyperlinks into narrative — perhaps someone already has — and a whole new kind of story-telling will become possible.) At Blue’s Cruzio Café, poetry is combined with animation and jazz: You click on a picture and the portrait starts to recite the poem to a jazz accompaniment. Poetry has exploded online, as I discovered when I wrote about it last year for The Inquirer. I announced my intention on my blog — yes, I blog — and invited comments, suggestions, information, links. I ended up with a story that was reported entirely via Internet. The Internet has revived literary activities that had been on the wane. Not many people correspond by letter anymore, but everybody does email and it seems altogether possible that email will develop into an art much as letter-writing did. Who knows what literary potential blogging may have? But consider this: The essay began as Montaigne’s method of exploring the contents of his consciousness, but quickly morphed into a vehicle for displaying literary style. Blogging may bring it back to what Montaigne was originally aiming at.

Christopher Wordsworth says of The Peregrine: "This rapt and remarkablebook is the record of a 10 year obsession and a paean to the winterlandscape of East Anglia." Ralph C. Baxter feels that "the genre may beconfusing to define. . . . It probably has to be called the winterdiary of a naturalist--though it is both more and less." Baxterdescribes the language as "brutal, hard, Saxon in quality. Yet it issharp, crisp, buright, like the fire that Baker perceives glowing inthe breasts of the peregrine falcons (females) and tiercels (males). .. . The language is perhaps the most poetic prose I have recently read.. . . It is perhaps Baker's complete readiness to accept the truth ofnature--its uncompromising quality--that makes The Peregrine such afantastic book."

"The Hill of Summer," writes Neil Millar, "is not just another naturebook. It is unique, poetic, feeling as well as seeing, built out of anaturalist's observation and a prose like adolescence: sensitive,romantic, clear-eyed, gawky, beautiful." Richard Kenneggy notes that"To read a few pages of The Hill of Summer is like finding there isstill peace on earth."

Of course, the real test is staying power. Religion has definitely demonstrated - and continues to demonstrate - that it has what it takes when it comes to longevity. Of course, atheism has been around a long time, too. ("The fool saith in his heart, 'There is no God.' ") I think it will continue, but as a distinctly minority viewpoint, one of its main problems being a disinclination on the part of its adherents to breed (not very Darwinian of them, I must say).

Avery Dulles has, of course, exerted more than a little influence on my own thinking, since he co-authored the book Introductory Metaphysics that was the textbook for the course I had in the subject many decades ago. Interestingly, I have just been reading Josef Pieper's Living the Truth, which deals with some of the matter touched upon in Cardinal Dulles's article.

In an altogether different connection, though, I particularly liked this:

Justin Barrett, an evolutionary psychologist now at Oxford, is also a practicing Christian. He believes that an all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good God crafted human beings to be in loving relationship with him and with one another. “Why wouldn’t God,” he asks, “design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?” Even if these mental phenomena can be explained scientifically, the psychological explanation does not mean that we should stop believing. “Suppose that science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me,” he writes. “Should I then stop believing that she does?”

Of course, this will surely be dismissed by the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens. You can never accommodate true believers.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Roger Simon, however, links us to a reminder that some things never change: In Praise of Victor Davis Hanson. (By the way, take a look at some of the comments attached to Hanson's article. They go far to prove his point.)

... after all, what's the point of having a blog if you can't from time to time toot your own horn and pound a bit on your own drum? Anyway, my poem "Entering the Black Sea" - a take on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth - appears in the latest issue Boulevard, presumably already in bookstores. I also make a contribution to their monthly Symposium. The topic this month Literature and the Internet. Boulevard really does deserve your support.

Had I not given up the sauce 18 years ago I'd probably be writing this from inside a jar on a shelf in some medical lab. Luckily for me I've always walked a lot and eaten well (not much taste for fast food and sparing of the cheese steaks and pizza). So, except for a bum knee (product of a kneecap fractured in a collision with concrete) I'm in pretty good shape. Unfortunately, I will still die.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

The word, of course, was originally a military term, referring specifically to what quartermasters were charged with doing. It has been coopted by businesses in their ongoing attempt to make what they do seem more dramatic than it in fact is. Their use of it, in other words, is one more exercise in pretentiousness.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

I find this bit about teaching "college students to use analytical thinking in the development of new ideas" interesting. Before you develop new ideas, you should first make sure you understand the ones that are already in existence, some of which have been around for a long time and were developed by some very sharp cookies.

I link to this because it is just the sort of thing journalism doesn't need and needs to guard against. God, getting your facts straight isn't even lesson No. 1. It's the premise of the whole enterprise. You read this, and then you read some grouchy print journalist gabble on about the careful fact-checking and skilled editing that distinguishes the work of print journalists from bloggers ... and what do you think?

This is pretty much right on the money: People like Hitchens and Dawkins and Dennett simply don't understand religion, which is why what they have to say on the subject strikes those with some understanding of it as so tedious.

In the end, nothing of any significance is decided by talking about religion in the abstract. It is a somewhat inane topic, really, relevant neither to belief nor to disbelief. It does not touch on the rationales or the experiences that determine anyone’s ultimate convictions, and certainly nothing important is to be learned from Daniel Dennett’s rancorous exchanges with nonexistent persons regarding the prospects for an impossible science devoted to an intrinsically indeterminate object. If Dennett really wishes to undertake a scientific investigation of faith, he should promptly abandon his efforts to describe religion in the abstract and attempt instead to enter into the actual world of belief in order to weigh its claims from within. As a first step, he should certainly-purely in the interest of sound scientific method and empirical rigor-begin praying. This is a drastic and implausible prescription, no doubt, but it is the only means by which he could possibly begin to acquire any knowledge of what belief is or what it is not.

We discovered last week that the playwright Arthur Miller, who abandoned his disabled son after the child was born because he was, in Miller’s words, “a mongoloid”, avoided all contact with the child until they met, to the playwright’s surprise, at a meeting where Miller was championing a better deal for disabled people. This sort of behaviour is beyond satire. To seek applause for your stance on behalf of suffering in general, while being so indifferent to the fate of individual suffering, is the quintessence of canting left-wingery. But for The Guardian Miller was as much the victim as anyone.

I hadn't known that Miller had actually met his son, let alone under such circumstances.

I'm neutral on the question of literary innovation. Fine if necessary and if it works, but I don't really believe in progress in art. That said, a work has to be judged on its own terms, and there is much in this piece that I agree with.

"Yet the democracy of the web is in danger of becoming a cacophonous nightmare. For every carefully crafted, thoughtful expression of opinion, there are a score of half-baked rants: ignorant, bilious, semi-literate and depressing."

You would think that everything that ever appeared in print was thoughtful and perfectly phrased. Truth be told. huge amounts of garbage continue to be printed, gobbled up by those with a taste for it and ignored by those with more refined palates.

According to Rorty: "The professionalization of philosophy, its transformation into an academic discipline, was a necessary evil. But it has encouraged attempts to make philosophy into an autonomous quasiscience. These attempts should be resisted. The more philosophy interacts with other human activities—not just natural science, but art, literature, religion and politics as well—the more relevant to cultural politics it becomes, and thus the more useful. The more it strives for autonomy, the less attention it deserves."

I don't know if the professionalization was necessary or not, but it has proved a bad idea - thoughit has happened over and over again throughout history. Socrates was not a professional philosopher. He was a guy trying to get people to think, preferably accurately and precisely. I don't think he aimed at devising a system of thought or was interested in constructing theries for their own sake.But the point was to live an enhanced life, not be "relevant to cultural polticis," whatever the hell that means.

... with Patrick Kurp and Anthony Daniels, but I think we part ways On the Cult of Kerouac. The link to Daniels's piece isn't working, so I've only been able to read bits and pieces of what he has to say. I can't tell if he has read anything of Kerouac's other than On the Road. I happen to think - and plan on elaborating the point in print in the not too distant future - that it has been Kerouac's misfortune to be judged solely on the basis of On the Road. I think he wrote better books and, like any author, deserves to be judged on the basis of his best, not his most famous, work.

Update: Thanks to Dave Lull, I have read Daniels's piece and he does not seem to be familiar with any Kerouac other than On the Road. He also doesn't seem to consider that what he discerns in the book is precisely what Kerouac may have been trying to get across.

I have experienced something of this myself: "I have never received such hate mail as when I suggested that religious people were better than non-religious in their conduct. It seemed that many of the people who responded to me were not content merely not to believe, but had to hate."

This covers more bases than may well exist, but there are some key points. That "the argument that it is book sections’ lack of advertising revenue from publishers that constrains book coverage is bogus" almost goes without saying, though not for any reason adduced herein. It's bogus because it is a syandard applied to no other section of the paper. Sports sections get less ad revenue from teams than book sections do from publishers. No, as is made plain, "the real problem was never the inability of book-review sections to turn a profit, but rather the anti-intellectual ethos in the nation’s newsrooms." It is an assumption that is made about who reads the paper, the assumption that readers are principally interested in TV and sports and pop music. There is also the assumption that all newspapers readers are policy wonks. Surveys indicating otherwise notwithstanding, the sales figures for books indicate that lot of people buy them and presumably read them. Ignore a segment of the population that large at your peril.

That said, by the way, A couple of weeks ago, The Inquirer's main book page featured a review of the Collected Poems of Cesar Vallejo and a novel by Simenon first published in 1933. Nobody complained.

... On Interpretation. I absolutely detest this sort of thing and agree with every word Nige says. I also detest those damned audio tours museums try to saddle you with. For God's sake, just look at the pictures. (I corrected my error regardingt who said this, thanks to Dave Lull.)

Monday, September 03, 2007

"... if [people] wanted a magazine, they had to have one with Posh or Di on the cover and the marketing goons concluded that, therefore, only Posh and Di sold mags because it was 'what the people wanted'." This, I think, is what is contributing to the decline of the media - media people thinking they know what people want ... without really bothering to get to know any people.

Sunday, September 02, 2007

... that Bryan ever sleeps: God, Music and Diana links to three piece in the Sunday Times, one about the 10th anniversary of the sainted Diana's passing, another about the science of music, and the third on broadcaster and journalist John Humphreys and Humpheys's struggles with faith - plus his original report on Diana's funeral. They are all excellent.

"Most journalists' understanding of the nature of blogging has been circumscribed by a focus on how it might affect our profession. We write articles about whether blogging can be journalism, we worry about whether bloggers can or will replace journalists, and we miss the real stories."

... the latest issue of Quay. Notice that our friend Christine Klocek-Lim has some poems and photos. I especially like Twenty-year love poem. Also note the interview with Roland Merullo. In fact, take a good look. There's lots of interest there.